When I made the cork monogram Z for my friend Carol, I bought two Z’s.  I bought the second one because I’d forgotten I’d already purchased one (a brief moment of old-age-ness!).  Not knowing any other Z friends, I decided to make the extra Z into something Christmas-y for Carol.  This is a true story of crapsmanship — I had many missteps along the way, but in the end, it turned out cute, cute, cute!

After an easy sanding around the edges, I painted the entire back green.  I thought that Carol might want to tuck this into her Christmas tree somewhere, and the green back would blend in nicely.  I then used one sheet of red scrapbook paper and traced around the Z.  The paper didn’t quite cover all of the letter, but that was okay since I was going to add embellishments that would help to cover the whole letter.  I cut around the traced line and ModPodged the letter to the Z.

CRAP ALERT:  Unfortunately I made several mistakes here.  First, I didn’t add enough glue to the back of the scrapbook paper and I had bubbles galore.  Secord, I wasn’t careful about pressing the paper to the letter.  I not only had bubbles of air in the letter, but when I tried to press the bubbles down, I got lots of creases.  It looked bad!

So my next step was to tear the paper off completely and start over.  The one smart thing I did was remove the paper before the glue had dried, so tearing it off wasn’t a problem.  Again, I traced a letter onto red scrapbook paper, but I was much more careful about applying plenty of ModPodge and smoothing the paper down as I worked section by section.

Next I added some green strips of scrapbook paper and a little Christmas-themed washi tape.  CRAP ALERT:  You can see in the picture above that I almost forgot to extend the Ho Ho Ho tape clearly across the letter.  Fortunately, I caught that stupid mistake before I’d completely finished adhering the decorative strips.

I then used an X-acto knife and a self-healing mat to cut cleanly around the letter to trim off any excess paper and tape.  CRAP ALERT:  Some areas that I trimmed looked ragged, so I used a fine sandpaper to smooth it.  That didn’t work — it just got more ragged — but luckily when I coated everything with ModPodge, the raggedy-ness disappeared for the most part.

Now the fun began!  I glued embellishments to the letter until I was satisfied it looked good (and the embellishments come in handy to hide any errors!).  In the photo above, I’ve got weights so the larger pieces would dry flat.

Voila!  Doesn’t it look good?  Now on to Hobby Lobby to buy a letter for my own tree!